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like I was, of using it in front of our peers — I committed his
username to memory and looked it up when I got home.
His entries were long and lovely, full of eloquent thoughts
on philosophy and literature and a bucket-list wish to live in
Asia. I left a flattering comment identifying myself, and then
I added the screen name in Aaron's profile to my AIM buddy
list.
Before long we were chatting all the time, late into the
night, and playing marathon Scrabble games online. I grew
to value him as a person with whom I could talk about real
things, like Isaac Asimov and Ayn Rand and whether happiness
was all an illusion (yes, my new friend said, and we can't
be trusted to measure our own). In a place where it seemed
nobody else knew what books were, I'd found my kindred
spirit in Aaron.
our online closeness never parlayed into a friendship at
school, though. one of us would say hi when the other walked
into the room, and sometimes we'd wave to each other in the
halls, but I was too shy to talk to him at length in person,
and French was our only period together. The rest of Aaron's
day was spent in a portable classroom with the kid who had
Down syndrome and a girl I knew from art class who was
always writing letters to her father in prison. Aaron didn't
show any signs of a broken home life or an intellectual disability
— quite the opposite, actually — so I never thought to
ask what the deal was with the separate class. I just assumed
he was there for some behavioral issue. Maybe he did drugs.
Both of us skipped our senior year and left for college
early, and thanks to late-starting schedules, we were staying
up chatting even later. I started hinting that we should meet
up the next time we were both back home, like in real life, at
my favorite hole-in-the-wall coffee shop. Several months had
passed since graduation, and I missed the guy.
"no, I don't drink coffee," he typed.
"Me either, but this place has a really good drink with
little candy-bar bits. It doesn't even taste like coffee."
"Why would you order coffee if it doesn't taste like coffee?"
"or you could get tea or whatever," I wrote back. "It'd just
be fun to hang out."
I had these scuffles with him every now and again. They
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